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DTV Coupon Program Out of Money
Thelasko writes "It appears that the US Government's digital converter box program is running out of money. If you sign up after the program runs out of money, you will receive your voucher if the program receives more funding. Older analog televisions will no longer work without a converter box after February 17."
You only need a converter box if you get your television via over-the-air broadcast and don't have a digital tuner built in. If you get your television via cable (with a cable box or no), satellite, FiOS, U-Verse, etc., you don't need a dtv converter box. On Feb. 17, nothing will change for you. If you get OTA broadcasts, and you're unsure if your television needs a box, if you have the ability to type in a hyphen or decimal point in the channel number on your TV, you hava digital tuner. Fo example, in the Los Angeles area market, if you can type in 11.1 (11-1), you will get Fox in both digital and HD via OTA broadcast. Your best bet if your'e unsure, however, is to look up if your TV has a digital tuner online on the equipment manufacturer's website.
The converter boxes are $50 at most places that sell this stuff. *shrug*
It could be difficult for someone on a fixed income, but generally, I agree. The target, though, is senior citizens on a fixed income...they figured most everyone else would have cable or satellite and thus the converter boxes would be a non-issue.
I have cable and won't be getting rid of it anytime soon, so this is a total non-issue for me.
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New TVs are not that expensive.
New TVs are expensive. If you're living on less than $800 a month, that $100+ is going to be felt. Trust me. This is obvious to anyone who hasn't had money supplied to them by their parents for their entire lives...
So the FCC made around 20 billion dollars auctioning off the spectrum, but only allocated 1.3 billion for the coupon program? At $40 /coupon, that's around 32 million coupons. I'm guessing there's more non-cable televisions than that. Something seems quite a bit wrong with the amount allocated.
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Sounds like they put macrovision on it. You can buy devices that remove the macrovision, they are pretty cheap, here is an example of such a product. They are called video stabilizers, you might be able to find one at you local electronics store, usually with the camcorders.
http://www.converters.tv/products/colour_correction_225.html
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WTF! What you're describing sounds like Macrovision ACP, I hadn't known that this was part of ATSC but I guess I'm not surprised.
ATSC hands MPEG-LA the patent rights to all broadcast TV video, and Dolby Labs the patent rights to all broadcast TV audio channels. For legal means to achieve what you want, you are likely screwed. The soap opera rights-owner is having the TV broadcaster set a "not allowed to be recorded" flag.
If you wish to potentially break the law (consult an attorney), you may be able to put an 'image stabilizer' or other device inline after the box.
Welcome to DRM.
I remember trying to copy some old VHS tapes that I'd picked up somewhere, so I didn't have to use/lose the original in a possibly abusive environment, and running across that problem. It was some encoding scheme by Macrovision that screwed up the recording circuits in a VCR, but wouldn't do anything to the playback circuits. There was a circuit diagram floating around somewhere at the time - you could probably still find it, maybe one of the links from here: http://forum.videohelp.com/topic246129.html - for a Macrovision scrubber. It would probably do the job for you in this case, too.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
This is where you're confused. The citizens of this country shouldn't have had to pay *ANYTHING* to buy a converter. The spectrum was sold for BILLIONS of DOLLARS to third parties and being that the citizens OWN the spectrum and the government does not, the money gained by this sale should have gone directly to us. I promise you that the $80 in coupons (which I didn't even get and they won't replace even though they didn't send it in any trackable manner) won't cover what we should have been given.
It's sad that people don't understand the simple fact that we got fucked on this deal all around.
Actually you would... if for no other reason than the beam patterns on headlights are angled such that they illuminate high towards the non traffic side of the road to help read signs and they illuminate low towards the on-coming traffic side of the road to prevent you from blinding oncoming traffic.
without replacing your head lights to a set that emits the proper beam pattern during night driving you'd be unable to read signs on the side of the road, and you would be blinding (not to mention blinded by) oncoming traffic.
Collector's Edition
I disagree 100%. Over the past 70 years, the NTSC standard has evolved from a mono sound, black & white picture to include color, stereo sound, second audio program and closed captions. These non-trivial changes were done without breaking backward compatibility with the original standard, not because of government protection, but because of market forces. No reasonable business wants to tick of a large installed base of users, even if starting fresh with a new standard would have been cleaner and easier. That's why Microsoft and Apple try to maintain backward compatibility with each new OS version, even if it means creating an emulation layer. They aren't mandated by the government to do it, they do it because of market forces.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
there are ways to adjust the head lights on cars. They have been there for years. Some newer cars have head lights that change direction a little when you turn. For the most part, cars with fixed (not auto turning) head lights are supposed to light up the road straight ahead (a little but to the sides but nothing more). If your head lights are lighting up more of one side of the road, they are out of adjustment.
Your road sign reasoning is wrong. On the roads around here signs are to the left, right, and overhead. Which would mean that head lights should shine on things over your car, to the left, and to the right at the same time.
this has nothing to do with the adjustment and everything to do with the way the reflectors inside the head light are designed.
Beam patterns are like this
LHD = ___/```````
RHD = ```````\____
Both lights have the same pattern, so even if one headlight was out it would project this pattern. It doesn't matter where the signs are where you live... all headlights are designed this way.
Go import some replacement headlights for your car off of a similar Japanese Domestic model... no amount of adjusting will correct this and I doubt the other motorists (or law enforcement) would be very happy about the change.
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